by Mseethaler | Jun 11, 2026 | Case, Teach
We are increasingly living in a surveillance state. Everything everywhere is tracked, stored, and traded by a series of corporations.
Your info stored, often irresponsibly, is leaked frequently
to hackers, but most often, simply sold to the highest bidder.
This post addresses a few general operational standards and practices one can employ to reduce
the amount of data you are sending to third parties. These concepts are
primarily targeted towards business operations, but apply also to households,
personal, non-profit, or government operations.
1. Own Your Hardware
This one is a bitter pill to swallow for some people, so it’s worth ripping
off first. Before software is addressed, one must think through carefully where
that software runs. The most sovereign position you can take is to
buy a server or two yourself and run your own software on it, providing your own
physical security. This gives maximum control over physical access to the data.
If you choose to run your software off of a VPS, which is a legitimate option in
many cases, ensure that you configure full disk encryption, and configure the
operating system to only allow access from trusted sources by IP filtering.
For many businesses, a bare-metal server hardware provider is a much better
position than subscribing to rented proprietary software.
Whether you own the server or not, ensure all server backups are encrypted, using Borg Backup, and that the data is
secured in at least 3 places in at least 2 forms or types of media, and that 1
backup is in a different physical location than your server.
A well configured VPS can eliminate all third party snooping
and telemetry and tracking if your software operations are clean, but it is still not as good as owning your own
hardware, which provides physical verification that no one is tampering or
plugging anything into your box.
2. Use Linux
On your server (And on your desktop if you’re a chad), you should run your
ops on Linux. Linux is the open source operating system, which comes in many
flavors (distros). For servers, I recommend Debian, for stability and the least amount of
extra crap thrown onto many Ubuntu distros. For desktop chads, of course, use
Omarchy or Arch.
Linux, of course, is open source, provides customizability and auditability all
the way down. Windows, on the other hand, is committed to two things, transforming your computer
into a subscription service, and spying on you. It is not possible to remove the
data collection from the Windows OS, and by law now in many states, it is not
possible to use it without providing age verification and email identification.
The reputation of MacOS is not quite as bad with telemetry as Windows (that’s a very low bar to
leap), but it still contains tons
of spyware out of the box.
One can toggle off a lot of the data
collection in the settings of either of these operating systems (they have a history of turning them back on without any consent), but in reality there is no real way to verify how
much of your activity is tracked or not with either of these systems, as neither of these operating systems are open
source (see point three). Additionally, MacOS works hard to restrict the synergy of your
operations with anything that is not also MacOS. You have much less freedom in
what you do with Apple software and hardware.
If you want privacy in using your computer hardware, there is no viable option other
than Linux.
3. Use Open Source Software
Open source software is software where the code is known and publicly readable
and auditable. In the age we live in, most, if not all, standard business functions can be run on free-to-use, open source software. Learn to use docker, learn to use nginx, and you’re in business.
Accounting, CRM, Websites, Calendars, Email, internal messaging, all of these can be run on open
source tools. The only thing that prevents people from doing it is of course
that many normies don’t see the need to operate this way, or if they are aware of
the problem, they do not care enough to do anything about it.
But tracking is only one of many benefits from using open source software.
It is far cheaper, there are no supplier restrictions and feature locks, the
only locks are capability locks, which can be closed with your own development
if needed. One also may achieve greater synergy among their software, and
customization.
There are myriads of benefits to running your business on these principles, but
for the sake of this article, only the telemetry aspect is in view. The simple
truth is that more hands holding your basic info (email, phone, address, SSN, family history, etc.)
means more risk of negative events: identity theft, being hacked, receiving endless spam, being
victim of a hostile tyrannical government, a private stalker, being doxed when
you go viral for something unexpected, etc. The fewer databases you’re in, the less risk of impediments to your goals.
But not only these basic facts about you are being tracked and stored; as
your business grows, you develop a set of books, transaction history,
operational history and communications, client lists, client info, browser
history, AI chat history, intellectual
property — the list grows as you grow. Companies are tripping over each other to
track store and sell all this data. They are selling it to third parties you don’t know, who want to
milk you for all of your strength and labor.
Run your own operations, your own hardware and software, to minimize molestation
from third parties. It requires more technical skill, but it’s worth it to learn
and grow, to be a steward or owner, rather than a slave.
If you desire technical assistance, reach out to me through Digital
Sovereignty
by Mseethaler | Jun 4, 2026 | Content
Automation is fun; it’s my speciality. Yet, with all the AI rage, Sally
from HR is wondering if her job is on the chopping block. This post addresses
the upward bound of automation; in other words, what can and cannot be
automated. With the increased capacity for automation via AI, it’s worth the attempt to
delineated some principles by which a process can quickly be evaluated to determine
its automation possibility.
I maintain that though the new tools are excellent and fun, many people now
vastly over-estimate what can actually can be automated. For the purpose of
this post, automation is defined as configuring technology to entirely remove
work from the effort of an operator, requiring no manual intervention for
executions and only occasional oversight and checks on performance. I hold that
defined tasks can and should be automated, but roles performed by agents, can
only be assisted.
High volume, rule governed tasks: fully automate
Any repetitive process where structured data travels through a
defined funnel: this is automation gold. For example, appointment and scheduling and reminders,
invoice tracking, standard requests for reviews from clients, omw texts, all-done texts, content posts to multiple platforms simultaneously,
repetitive administrative communications with established relationships.
Generic intake forms, repeatable data processing (a data export from one system to an
import into another system). However, most of this has already been available
through scripting, and AI is not bringing much new here.
What AI brings to the picture is automation of fuzzy input.
Classification of bank transactions, sorting classes of incoming email, for example.
However, this still requires strict and well thought through rules, and
auditability. These automations, as opposed to scripts, are the most expensive to run and the most fragile in production. They cost the
most and should be recommended the least. This leads naturally into the second category:
Value-based, ambiguous judgements, can be assisted.
Anything that requires value judgements, or ambiguous situations, cannot be fully automated, but can be assisted by AI.
Responding to emails, composing communications (to be used with caution), cold-warm prospecting, outreach scripts, follow up sequences, building/coding, websites, or
pipelines. These, I hold, can and only ever can be assisted, they are all at
root expressions of the values of the operator, which must be the rooted guide to any generative AI. Any profitable production use of AI automation in these situations, still require strict scoping, monitoring, direction and wisdom, to be provided by the operator. These mentioned have left the sphere of the tasks, and have entered that of an ongoing role.
Setting up an AI agent to read and respond to all the customer emails is a
great way to lose all your customers. Setting up a prospecting agent to do 1,000
cold reach-outs a day via email and text is a great way to set the world on
fire. Composition aid arguably should not be
used at all, as it makes the operator weaker and dumber over time, as he
outsources more and more speech and intelligence. Not to mention that many people, even now, despite the claims of many token salesmen, are still perfectly capable of sensing AI vs. human written content. It’s all in the choices.
Communication and critical operation roles will always require, at minimum, the oversight of the operator. However, once an operator has determined the general concept of the response, AI can generate
polished drafts with lots of em dashes — marshmallow fluff. This is ideal in situations where highly polished boiler-plate HR-
approved language is most necessary, and one is happy to not waste their mind on a mind-wasting task, like
responding to toll booth operators, deploying your agent to call customer
service on your behalf.
That is to say, ambiguous situations which require value judgments can be assisted with automation, but only assisted. Assistance means defining values for the bot, giving iterative direction,
and auditing performance, especially for anything in critical production roles.
Tasks with personal, relational, or legal accountability: never
You open up open claw and say, “do my taxes”, “run my business”, “respond to all
my emails”, “text my wife”. This is a bad move. When the chickens come home to roost, you’re the one who has to sit in a judgment seat.
Any role where there is legal or relational or personal accountability, will
never be able to be handed off to an autonomous agent. Men are given dominmion
over the earth, men are in covenant with God, fellow man, and the state, and men
are the ones who must answer for the way they spend their talents.
When Open Claw cheats on your taxes, who will uncle Sam arrest, you or your bot? When you your agent army spends all your ad money to pump slop to all channels, rendering you a negative ROI on your AI-psychosis-induced-side-hustle, who loses their assets, you or your bot? When you send Open Claw on date night with your wife, who signs the divorce papers, you or your bot?
When a man automates, he is automating toward a purpose, but his choices, his automation, his success or failure in achieving his purpose; these are required at his hand, not at the hand of his tools.
Things which shouldn’t be automated but people will still try:
Let me take a moment to be bold in three predictions:
Outbound prospecting. As people have become more accessible through
technology, personal trust and accountability are the things which sell.
We’re all already getting 10-15 spam/cold outbound emails and calls a day. Do you
think an AI doing the calls will convert anyone worth converting? Your only “sales” will come from the nursing home.
Writing. Or at least long-form writing which quality readers will actually want to read. Who will invest time and thought into the perspective of a writer who is not capable of expressing it on his own? Who’s reading a writer who
can’t write? We’re in a time of a deep dearth of soul. Your slop thesis can stay in the GPT where it belongs. We will spend our time with the men of old who had MIND!
Customer service: customers will choose the business which gives the time to
talk to them. Everyone already has access to high-quality intelligence
systems, and public docs and FAQ’s
to attempt to solve their own problems. By the time they are reaching out to
a business in desperation, a bot is the last thing they want to hear. This holds unless the Bezos-class
gets their way, in which we’ll all be pushing boxes around in a
warehouse until the Lord returns anyway. Maranatha!
In sum:
People are generally too materialistic in their evaluation of man, they think AI
bots and humans are the same in substance, and different in form only; they both take in information, and based on deterministic if/then statements, training data, base model
and memory, will process it all the same and come to deterministic results. This is false. Humans
will always have a quality/substance which no organization of matter and machinery will: a soul.
A soul brings wisdom or folly, values or corruption, discernment or
foolishness; a soul is the prerequisite for the establishment of trust, because it is the prerequisite for accountability, two things your sweet AI bot will never have.
Though I would be happy if we can find a way to automate Sally from HR.
by Mseethaler | May 27, 2026 | Uncategorized
One of our Lizard-lords once said that in the future,
You’ll own nothing and be happy about it.
Some men see other men only as a thing to be ruled. Some men, somewhere along
the way got the idea that the world was something to steal; that they are the
farmers and we are the cattle. They promise to feed us, give us safe stables,
while we provide the milk, and are fattened for the slaughter. For, they preach, it is a known fact and well accepted by all the great minds
that cattle are not capable of farming, of owning their own estate. For slaves have no right to be self-ruled free
men.
What’s all this then: Digital Sovereignty is the concept that your tech exists
for you, and not that you exist for the technology. Your hardware is that, your hardware. You shouldn’t have pay rent to use it.
Your software (and here is the true rub) is actually your software, and you shouldn’t have to pay rent to use it. This is the thesis of digital sovereignty. Own your own technological estate.
It’s been quite some time we’ve had these computers; they’ve really taken over the world. As they’ve grown, their power has grown, and their ubiquitous presence. The plumber now finds
his next leaky pipe, not from the paper, not from the herald, but from the
computer. Your car is now more computer than car; some even have started dating their
computers (and we are told by the Japanese not to notice or judge). But with all
this computing, some of us have started to feel that we are the computed.
All these services are tracking our thoughts and actions. Apparently I must
log into my car. We are pushed onto endless subscriptions, to run software we cannot own
on hardware that is supposedly ours, yet we cannot modify without legal
consequence; we are locked out of our own devices, unable to install what is
ours by divine right, what is withheld from us for “safety”.
My wife and I went to buy a cat from a breeder. We went to buy a cat. As in the cat would move from
the possession of the seller to our possession. Well, the breeder and I apparently
don’t share the same dictionary. She pulls the contract: terms upon terms!
Should we decide to sell the cat, we must sell to her first! Should she think that we are bad
owners, she may repossess the cat back with no refund! She had visitation rights to the cat. Should she
sue us for violation of the contract (solely upon her discretion, of course), we must pay all her legal fees. When we
say buy, we mean ownership; when she say buy, she means
she’ll issue a temporary license to access the cat which may be
revoked at any time at her discretion.
Sovereignty is the ability to do what one wants with one’s property, not being subject
to the will of another. Now, I’m no godless pagan warlock — we are all
subject to the law of God, and will stand at the judgement. But these
sellers got it in their heads along the way that commerce is to be done according
to the standard of a divorced crazy cat woman, and we all must
stand before the judgment seat of ${LIZARD_CORPORATION}.
From the counsels of eternity past, when our first fathers fought the giants,
it’s been debated whether one must cut costs, or increase costs to increase
revenue. The baker bakes less when his buns have less to pay for. But if he must
bake, he ought to invest in equipment to bake more when he bakes: more bake; less time. But
if the equipment which he purchases cannot be purchased, but
rented, then he truly can never stop baking, because he must now bake to pay for baking!
If he was born to bake — and only bake: if he should sleep and live in his bakery,
it is then good and right that he only profits enough to pay for his act of baking.
But should he ever desire to spend a day not baking, perhaps to take a wife, to
help his neighbor, to preach the Gospel, to ride a bike: he finds that he cannot leave; he is chained
to his kitchen.
When one must rent the tools of production, one is enslaved to the specific
realm of production for which the tools are rented. If one cannot simply buy a
rake to rake the leaves, but must rent the rake at a monthly rate, one
cannot simply rake his leaves. One must go from house
to house, knocking on doors of the neighbors, and offer 50%-off our leaf-raking
special. One must put all the yards into our new CRM, and hopefully make enough
in the fall to sustain us until the next busy season, lest the reaper come and
take away the rake and the house together.
Imagine with me — and it is difficult, I admit — a life where you owned your
possessions, your
castle, your car, your computer, your software, your clothing, your cattle, your
fields. Such freedom! Not freedom for the life of the sluggard, but a life to
reap and plow, to serve God and love one’s neighbor.
“Oh” but you may be thinking “in this utopian vision you have, you have
forgotten one thing, property tax!” Yes, it is hard to imagine a world where the
government does not treat its citizens as tenants, to rent the land which they
supposedly own. Let us deal with one set of overlords at a time. First the
unelected.
Ownership of your tools leads to more discretionary
time, which is true wealth, more freedom.
Rented Software
Software is the primary battleground of digital sovereignty.
Our Computers are at the root of it. Now computers at root are information systems, they are tools for the recording data and
processing of that data according to preset instructions; this even holds true
for A.I.. The instructions written to run that data must be written by
someone or something, viz. software developers.
Software, generally must be maintained, (though the necessary maintenance, in closed systems, is widely overestimated).
The unrelenting desire/need for greater profits incentivizes companies to design
products that bring recurring revenue. A buyer who walks away with a permanent product is
not forced into future purchases for future use. A subscriber doesn’t walk away
with a product, but with a license to temporarily access something he doesn’t own. The subscriber is dependent upon the provider for continued use of what they have already paid for. This is what these companies desire: permanent dependence.
“Buying” and “selling” presupposes the reality of ownership. Subscription
companies frequently use terms like “buy” and “sell” during the transaction, but
in the terms of service, those terms are redefined so as to accord with the mind of
divorced-cat-woman. What they provide is not a product, it’s a plantation.
It is understandable for people to protect their intellectual property, and software
developers should be paid for their work. Workers are worthy of their wages. No one
may be compelled to work for free. But the model adopted by most software
companies forces a purchase of work today to also include an obligation for
purchases of future work in order to continue to use the work purchased today.
That is, they offer no way to purchase a one-off job, or a finished and
completed product which the buyer is responsible to maintain and keep. But
instead, as the provider continues to endlessly update their product, that work
is forced onto the buyer, and the buyer has no means of preserving access to
their past purchases without continuing to pay the provider indefinitely.
Take for example, the modern XBOX and Playstation game library subscriptions. It
may seem on the surface to be a benefit to the buyer, to only have to pay $20 to access 1,000
of video games, but the economic reality is that it is a bad deal.
Instead of paying $60 once to receive a physical piece of media, which can be
played infinitely, so long as the buyer stewards it well, rather, the buyer must continue to
deal with the seller forever, even as the seller is free to change their terms
however they please, or to add and remove content from the library at will. The
buyer has transient, fleeting, temporary access to the content they thought they owned. I
have video games, console and disk, which my parents purchased for me as a
child. My children will be able to play these game. But anyone who has dealt
with a provider through a subscription library will eventually lose access to
what they purchased, while having payed an order of magnitude more for it.
Where is the honest transaction where the seller provides property to the buyer, and relinquishes all claims to that property
upon the transaction? Many companies today do not offer any path to
ownership at all. The only terms of business
are terms of dependence.
As an example of a software company which does respect ownership, I give you Ableton, who sells the digital audio workstation software Ableton live. The company sells a finished version of a software at a set price. The buyer pays for that software;
the buyer can use that software forever. It is upon the buyer to maintain the
environment fit to run that software. Ableton makes future revenues by
creating addons and other offerings to their users, as well as selling updates.
If the purchaser desires to get the update, they can pay for it as well. If they
are content with their current holdings, they do not upgrade. It’s a clean,
honest and ethical transaction. Would that there were more companies like this.
Open Source
Businesses today need not live with this. The good news is that so many people desire free and open
software that they have created it for themselves; or they have a business model where they give
the software away for free, and make the money some other way. Many have designed
a system to escape the plantations and were gracious enough to the rest of us to
release it into the wild.
And the good thing is, once a software is written and released to the world, it
is permanently known; it cannot be retracted. Tools like CRM’s, Accounting
Software, Project Management Softwares, are basicaly solved problems. The code
to run these programs is known and available. One only needs the technical
skill to do it.
For whatever motivation there be behind the development of so many open source projects (again, people should be paid for their labor) the naked truth is that tons of programs exist, with known and open code, which can be launched and run in a
private environment with no external dependencies. And when it’s yours, you can
do whatever you want with it. You can tweak it, modify it, but usually, you can
simply use it and enjoy the utility which it provides to bake your bread and
make your gold. Praise the Lord.
More on this in coming essays.
